Roadtrip back to Italia via France, Germany & Switzerland

How are you all? I wanted to give a quick run down on our very scenic roadtrip back to Italy – it feels like a long time ago now but in reality we only got back on Monday.

So, the first leg of our journey was from Portsmouth to Cherbourg…

View from the ferry towards Cherbourg

Rare non-child head occupied view of the window. We had good seats.

Not particularly fascinating photos but it’s evidence nonetheless! The ferry was fast – only 3 hours as opposed to over 6 hours on the trip back to the UK. Then we had a few hours drive down to a little town called Olivet near Orleans in France. We’d had a long day and couldn’t drum up the necessary motivation to take photos but it was pretty and we camped up just by a river. The campsite, Camping Olivet had the makings of a good one but it was let down because they didn’t have toilet roll (indeed, no toilet seats – that seems to be a typically French thing???) or soap and you either had cold water or warm water (either good for showers and bad for teethbrushing or vice versa!).

Then onto Freiburg im Breisgau (I’m just going to call it Freiburg) in Germany for a couple of nights. Freiburg is really lovely – I thoroughly recommend going. The town is pretty with quaint little cobblestones and little streams running through the streets and the houses and apartments are all well kept and pretty. It’s right next to the Black Forest so there are some great walks too. We went on a 4 hour walk up the local mountain (I do not recommend doing this in flipflops) which had some great views and then took a cable car down and then a couple of busses/trams to get back to the campsite. The campsite itself, Moslepark, was one of the prettiest I’ve been to. Lots of flowers and the facilities were all very swish. Our pitch was alas, right next to the children’s play area – we had refreshing early starts.

Look how pretty the cobblestones are!

School buildling – very pretty but with irritatingly non symmetrical brickwork.

This was taken from halfway up our mountain walk (Schauinsland) for anyone wishing to do the same – 1284m

The streets were wide, the pavements were wide, lovely well kept houses, lots of cyclists…

Then our final stop was in La Fouly, Swtizerland. I like Switzerland and I’ve stayed in a couple of beautiful places in the past – Interlaken and Lake Lucerne, I tried to book a couple of nights around the same places this time around but they were booked out or needed us to stay more than 5 nights. Unfortunate I thought at the time, but actually I’m really pleased they were because the campsite, Camping des Glaciers in La Fouly where we ended up staying is set in the prettiest environment I’ve ever stayed in. The campsite was set between majestic glacier capped mountains, a trickling stream teeming with wild flowers and a quaint little village. Alas, after setting up camp and successfully drying out the sodden tent from a wet last night in Freiburg, that’s when the rain really DID come. At this point we were in town so found a little bar to wait until it stopped. On and on it went so in the end we had a very nice 80’s style dinner at the bar – fondue (even me, an avid cheese eater, was cheesed out by the end of that meal). Anyway, these are some of the photos…

I quite fancy having a log cabin like this…

Pretty flowers…

The mountains…

And more mountains…

Then it was back to Falconara in Italy, Again, the stark difference in driving styles between the Italians and the French and Germans was noticeable! However, we learnt something – when it starts to rain, admittedly this was a downpour of biblical proportions, the Italians all start to drive sensibly and use that strange extraneous ‘slow’ (inside to you and me) lane on the motorway. Some even stop on the hard shoulder under motorway bridges until this phenomenon has passed. Hardly anybody uses the 3rd (outside overtaking) lane meaning that if you do, because you’ve spent most of your life driving in those type of conditions, the traffic runs miles better and even though it’s raining, you can make much more headway. So my tip for motorway driving here – do it during a downpour! Otherwise be prepared to stew in increasing frustration and incredulity as everybody clogs up the middle and outside lane and nobody uses the inside lane even though it would benefit everybody.

Right, that’s it for this post – tune in shortly for another post on the new house and the scary uninvited houseguest…